Earlier this week I took part in an interview with Helen St Helen, an online journalist based in Ohio, USA. She has a connection with Edinburgh and, consequently, with Scottish musicians. We covered how I started songwriting, various bands I’ve had and my songwriting ‘process’ if it can be called that. Helen’s site – Helen … Read more
Continuing my musical life story with one of the stranger episodes- how attention-seeking ended the first band I led. By the middle of the 1980s, in Manchester, I’d got over the novelty of multitrack recording and begun to take songwriting seriously. Solitary songwriting I’d been writing songs since I was 16 but I’d always tended … Read more
Continuing my long and winding road through music. How I found moved from Egypt to Manchester and found multi-track heaven in the Teac Tascam Portastudio 144. Cairo At the age of 28 I was living in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, and teaching English to working people in an evening school. This was my second … Read more
Continuing my musical autobiography … You’d have thought going to University, suitcase and guitar in hand, would have been the perfect springboard for a teenage performing career. For some reason, when I went to Glasgow University at 18, it wasn’t. I never meant to be here Partly this was because it was unexpected. I hadn’t … Read more
My tastes in music as a teenager were pretty conventional … Until … Continuing my life in music … Before I got my first guitar, I’d drifted away from rock towards listening to classical and film music. As a young teenager rediscovering pop music via my guitar, at first I followed fairly conventional bands: I … Read more
At the age of 16 I’d been playing for less than two years but was able to pick up tunes quickly and guesstimate chords from a few hearings of a song. That year, 1970, our school took part in the Rencontre Franco-Ecossaise. About fifty 16-year olds from Ayrshire schools got to spend two weeks of … Read more